The skin where the pendant touched her chest was hot. It singed her fingers when she touched it.
Esme’s expression was sphinxlike. She pulled a vial of purple salve from her pocket and pressed it into Eureka’s hand. “For your friend. The bees will never leave her, but if I am right about her character—and I do loathe being wrong—she will grow to cherish them. This will disappear the pain. Do you have any more requests? Any other services you would like us to provide?”
Eureka produced The Book of Love’s missing pages. “Can you read this?”
“Of course,” Esme said. “It is written in our mother tongue, read best with closed eyes.”
Behind Esme, the old witch with the monocle patted a purple pillow. “Make yourself at home,” she hissed.
Eureka sat. She wanted to get the translation and hurry back down the mountain, back to the Bitter Cloud. But the fire was warm and the pillow was comfortable, and suddenly her hand held a mug of something steaming. She brought it cautiously near her face. It smelled like grape soda spiked with anise alcohol.
“No, thank you.” Diana had read Eureka fairy tales. She knew not to drink.
“Please imbibe.” The witch beside her pushed the cup to Eureka’s lips. “You will need a tad of Dutch courage.”
All around the lair, witches raised matching mugs, then drained them in a gulp.
The witch tipped the cup. Eureka winced and swallowed.
The brew tasted so unexpectedly wonderful—like caramel hot chocolate thickened with cream—and Eureka was so unfathomably thirsty, and that first swallow filled her body with such long-awaited warmth that she couldn’t stop. She guzzled the rest before she knew what she had done. The witches beamed as she wiped her lips.
“What a joy to see the old language again,” Esme sang, flipping through the pages Eureka had given her with her eyes closed. “Shall I begin at the beginning, which is never a beginning but is always in the middle of something already begun?”
“I already know some of the story,” Eureka said. “I had a translator at home.”
“Home?” Esme lifted her chin. Her eyes were still closed, amethyst lids glittering.
“In Louisiana, where I lived … before I cried.” She thought of Madame Blavatsky’s crimson lipstick, her tobacco-scented patchwork cloak and flock of lovebirds, her compassion when Eureka needed it most. “My translator was very good.”
Esme’s painted lips pulled skeptically on her spiral pipe. Artemisia embers glowed. She opened her eyes. “One would have to be from our home, from Atlantis, in order to read this text. Are you sure this translator did not feed you lies?”
Eureka shook her head. “She knew things she couldn’t have known. She could read this, I’m certain of it. I believe my mother could, too.”
“You mean to suggest that someone has been dipping our pure tongue in the filthy creeks of your world?”
“I don’t know about that—”
“What do you know?” Esme interrupted.
Eureka closed her eyes and remembered the exhilaration she’d felt when she first learned her ancestor’s story. “I know Selene loved Leander. I know they had to flee Atlantis to be together. I know they boarded a ship the night before Selene was supposed to marry Atlas. I know Delphine was scorned when Leander chose Selene.” She paused to survey the gossipwitches, who had never seemed so serious, so still. They were hanging on her words the way Eureka had hung on Madame Blavatsky’s, as if she were telling the old tale for the first time. “And I know the last thing Selene saw when she sailed away were gossipwitches, who spoke the curse of her Tearline.”
“Her Tearline?” Esme repeated with a strange lilt.